Kevin Hammond is a full professor of Computer Science at the
University of St Andrews, where he leads the functional programming
research group. His research interests lie in programming language
design and implementation, with a focus on parallelism and
real=time properties of functional languages, including modelling and
reasoning about extra-functional properties. In total, he has published
around 100 research papers, books and articles, and held over 20
national and international research grants, totalling around £11M
of research funding. He was a member of the Haskell design committee,
co-designed the Hume real-time functional language, and is co-editor of
the main reference text on parallel functional programming. He
currently coordinates the ParaPhrase project, a 3-year EU research
project that aims to develop new refactoring technology for Erlang and
C++ programs, targeting heterogeneous parallel architectures. Kevin
is a keen hill-walker, whisky connoisseur and enjoys early music.

Kevin Hammond is Giving the Following Talks

Tutorial: Putting the Skeletons back in the Closet: Effective Parallel Programming in Erlang

Multicore architectures are here today, offering major advantages in terms of performance and low energy use. New chips like Intel's 60-core Xeon Phi co-processor point the way towards dramatically increased performance.

Do you need to take advantage of the ever-increasing number of cores in modern processors? Are you unsure how to tackle the exciting programming challenges that parallel computing introduces? This tutorial introduces new pattern-based techniques and tools for Erlang that allow the programmer to quickly and easily write effective parallel code. The tutorial introduces the free Erlang parallel programming library, Skel*, shows how to quickly and automatically introduce parallelism using dedicated refactorings in a standard text editor, and gives hands-on experience with a large multicore machine, leading the programmer step-by-step through the process of writing effective parallel code.

The tutorial is given by Kevin Hammond and Chris Brown, pioneers in the use of refactoring technology for parallel programming. Kevin Hammond has almost 30 years of parallel programming expertise, and deep knowledge of functional programming techniques; Chris Brown is a world leader in refactoring tools for functional languages.